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As visitors walk through the Painted Forest exhibit at Whatcom Museum’s Old City Hall location, they’ll see dozens of glossy specimens containing tones ranging from muted to brilliant, oscillating on the exhibit walls, laying exposed on tabletops or encased within glass vitrines. 
The specimens shimmer and contain colors like gems but are actually fossilized plants known as petrified wood.
Amy Chaloupka, the chief curator at Whatcom Museum, explained she organized the space to make the pieces more accessible to visitors. 
“There’s such textural variation and interest in these pieces that you can see when you get up close to them,” she said.
Tree stumps, extinct ferns and pinecones are just a few of the exhibit’s striking pieces. The showcase delves into the science of their formation, in collaboration with George Mustoe, a retired Western Washington petrified wood researcher.
Chaloupka said she curates natural history shows, “and sometimes that goes into the realm of science.”
Visual intrigue remained the priority when curating the exhibits, Chaloupka said, but as she worked with Mustoe, she also learned how special they are as specimens. 
Emerging as an art marvel, petrified wood is the result of millennia of intricate scientific processes. Fossilization occurs with vegetation being submerged for millions of years in mud or ash, where colorful minerals such as iron, chromium and nickel slowly replaced the plant’s natural organic material.
The specimens were collected between the 1930s and ’60s by Richard and Helen Rice, founders of the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks in Hillsboro, Oregon. The duo went fossil hunting and traded pieces with fellow hunters around the world. Their collection grew and contains specimens that range in age, shape, color, size and origin. 
Today, petrified wood of this size is often found on public lands where gathering or collection is banned. It was not just fossil hunters who were fascinated with petrified wood.
Chaloupka explained the museum’s painted forest exhibit specimens were a cultural marker in a region where beach combing, hiking and fellow geology enthusiasts are common. 
Scientists such as Mustoe spent their career studying the formation of petrified wood, rejecting textbook and research explanations that the minerals preserved the wood’s native structure.
Instead, he found only a small percentage of original organic matter remains within petrified wood samples. 
When plants die they begin to decay in the presence of oxygen. If oxygen is absent and the plant is in contact with water rich in minerals, petrified wood formation begins. As plants steep in mineral-rich water the plant cell walls are replaced with silica and other minerals, hardening the wood.
Some of Mustoe’s microscopy images are on display at the exhibit. They show the structure of mineral crystallization on plant materials at the nanometer scale, a scale 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Underneath the caked-on sediments and bumpy bark, the once woody structure is branded with a mineral signature dependent on the surrounding matrix, often resulting in blue, yellow, red and purple hues that “pop” once polished. Colors within the suffocated tree trunks are reminiscent of kaleidoscopes, tie-dye, 20th-century expressionism and glazed pottery.
Painted Forest: The Science and Beauty of Petrified Wood will be on display in Old City Hall until April 25, 2027. Old City Hall is open noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday–Sunday at 250 Flora St. Info: www.whatcommuseum.org/exhibition/painted-forest/

Kenedy Sánchez is an environmental/science reporter placed at CDN through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellowship. Reach her at kenedysanchez@cascadiadaily.com.
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